The notion of entanglement has been useful for characterizing universal properties of quantum phases of matter. From the perspective of quantum information theory, it is tempting to ask whether their entanglement structures possess any operational meanings, e.g., quantifying the cost of preparing an entangled system via free operations such as the local operations and classical communication (LOCC). While the answer is affirmative for pure states in that entanglement entropy coincides with entanglement cost, the case for mixed states is less understood. To this end, we study the entanglement cost required to prepare the thermal Gibbs states of certain many-body systems under positive-partial-transpose (PPT) preserving operations, a set of free operations that include LOCC. Specifically, we show that for the Gibbs states of $d$-dimensional toric code models for $d = 2, 3, 4$, the PPT entanglement cost exactly equals entanglement negativity, a measure of mixed-state entanglement that has been known to diagnose topological order at finite temperature.
The notion of entanglement has been useful for characterizing universal properties of quantum phases of matter. From the perspective of quantum information theory, it is tempting to ask whether their entanglement structures possess any operational meanings, e.g., quantifying the cost of preparing an entangled system via free operations such as the local operations and classical communication (LOCC). While the answer is affirmative for pure states in that entanglement entropy coincides with entanglement cost, the case for mixed states is less understood. To this end, we study the entanglement cost required to prepare the thermal Gibbs states of certain many-body systems under positive-partial-transpose (PPT) preserving operations, a set of free operations that include LOCC. Specifically, we show that for the Gibbs states of d-dimensional toric code models for d=2,3,4, the PPT entanglement cost exactly equals entanglement negativity, a measure of mixed-state entanglement that has been known to diagnose topological order at finite temperature.
We propose a diagnostic for finite temperature topological order using "topological entanglement negativity," the long-range component of a mixed-state entanglement measure. As a demonstration, we study the toric code model in d spatial dimensions for d=2,3,4, and find that when topological order survives thermal fluctuations, it possesses a nonzero topological entanglement negativity, whose value is equal to the topological entanglement entropy at zero temperature. Furthermore, we show that the Gibbs state of 2D and 3D toric code at any nonzero temperature, and that of 4D toric code above a certain critical temperature, can be expressed as a convex combination of short-range entangled pure states, consistent with the absence of topological order.
Quantum entanglement plays a leading role in modern understanding of physical systems, from quantum phases of matter to quantum gravity. In quantum information theory, one seeks operationally meaningful quantifiers of entanglement, which for large quantum systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate due to the lack of computationally efficient algorithms. In this Letter, we show that for large random induced mixed states the logarithmic negativity, an efficiently computable entanglement measure, generically coincides with the exact entanglement cost under positive-partial-transpose-preserving operations, thereby acquiring a precise operational interpretation. Our results establish logarithmic negativity as an exact characterization of entanglement in generic many-body states and provide a tractable route for quantifying entanglement in complex quantum systems.
We demonstrate the irreversibility of asymptotic entanglement manipulation under quantum operations that completely preserve the positivity of partial transpose (PPT), resolving a major open problem in quantum information theory. Our key tool is a new efficiently computable additive lower bound for the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement with respect to PPT states, which can be used to evaluate the entanglement cost under local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We find that for any rank-two mixed state supporting on the 3⊗3 antisymmetric subspace, the amount of distillable entanglement by PPT operations is strictly smaller than one entanglement bit (ebit) while its entanglement cost under PPT operations is exactly one ebit. As a by-product, we find that for this class of states, both the Rains's bound and its regularization are strictly less than the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement. So, in general, there is no unique entanglement measure for the manipulation of entanglement by PPT operations. We further show a computable sufficient condition for the irreversibility of entanglement distillation by LOCC (or PPT) operations.
This paper establishes single-letter formulas for the exact entanglement cost of simulating quantum channels under free quantum operations that completely preserve positivity of the partial transpose (PPT). First, we introduce the $\ensuremath{\kappa}$-entanglement measure for point-to-point quantum channels, based on the idea of the $\ensuremath{\kappa}$ entanglement of bipartite states, and we establish several fundamental properties for it, including amortization collapse, monotonicity under PPT superchannels, additivity, normalization, faithfulness, and nonconvexity. Second, we introduce and solve the exact entanglement cost for simulating quantum channels in both the parallel and sequential settings, along with the assistance of free PPT-preserving operations. In particular, we establish that the entanglement cost in both cases is given by the same single-letter formula, the $\ensuremath{\kappa}$-entanglement measure of a quantum channel. We further show that this cost is equal to the largest $\ensuremath{\kappa}$ entanglement that can be shared or generated by the sender and receiver of the channel. This formula is calculable by a semidefinite program, thus allowing for an efficiently computable solution for general quantum channels. Noting that the sequential regime is more powerful than the parallel regime, another notable implication of our result is that both regimes have the same power for exact quantum channel simulation, when PPT superchannels are free. For several basic Gaussian quantum channels, we show that the exact entanglement cost is given by the Holevo-Werner formula [Holevo and Werner, Phys. Rev. A 63, 032312 (2001)], giving an operational meaning of the Holevo-Werner quantity for these channels.
Quantum information theory is plagued by the problem of regularizations, which require the evaluation of formidable asymptotic quantities. This makes it computationally intractable to gain a precise quantitative understanding of the ultimate efficiency of key operational tasks such as entanglement manipulation. Here, we consider the problem of computing the asymptotic entanglement cost of preparing noisy quantum states under quantum operations with positive partial transpose (PPT). By means of an analytical example, a previously claimed solution to this problem is shown to be incorrect. Building on a previous characterization of the PPT entanglement cost in terms of a regularized formula, we construct instead a hierarchy of semidefinite programs that bypasses the issue of regularization altogether, and converges to the true asymptotic value of the entanglement cost. Our main result establishes that this convergence happens exponentially fast, thus yielding an efficient algorithm that approximates the cost up to an additive error ϵ in time poly(D,log(1/ϵ)), where D is the underlying Hilbert space dimension. To our knowledge, this is the first time that an asymptotic entanglement measure is shown to be efficiently computable despite no closed-form formula being available.
The mysterious nature of entanglement, one of the most prominent exquisitely quantum phenomena, is reflected in its intricate operational structure, with a hierarchy of classes of free operations that enable its manipulation at different levels of effectiveness. Here we use the class of 'flower states', parametrised by their (even) local dimension 2k, to shine light on some aspects of this varied landscape. We compute all the main entanglement measures for flower states, uncovering a large gap between all forms of distillable entanglement, equal to 1 ebit independently of the local dimension, and the entanglement cost under local operations and classical communication (LOCC), known to be equal to log(2k). Even under the strictly more powerful class of non-entangling (NE) operations, we show that their cost is still equal to log(1+k), only about an ebit less than for LOCCs. This result, which we prove by calculating the recently introduced tempered entanglement negativity for these states, demonstrates the largest known 'irreversibility gap', i.e. the difference between distillable entanglement and entanglement cost, under NE operations, equal to Θ(21logd), with d being the local dimension. A notable consequence is that the celebrated squashed entanglement is not a monotone under NE operations. Finally, we compute the exact cost under LOCC operations for flower states; this is given by the Schmidt number, which turns out to be additive over multiple copies and equal to minr∣klog(r+rk); for prime k this reduces to log(k+1), about twice the standard LOCC cost. These last results leverage the uncertainty relations over cyclic groups proved by Tao and Meshulam.